Points of view: reconceptualising literacies through an exploration of adult and child interactions in a virtual world

Points of view: reconceptualisingliteracies through an exploration of adultand child interactions in a virtual world

Cathy Burnett and Guy MerchantDepartment of Teacher Education, Sheffield Hallam University, UK

This article explores theoretical and methodological issues in literacy studies emergingfrom an investigation of how children and adults make meanings when virtual worldsare embedded in classroom contexts. Drawing on the work of Law and Mol and Kwa’sexploration of ‘baroque complexity’, it highlights the importance of recognising andinterrogating multiplicity in examining interactions through and around texts. Theimplications of this, we suggest, go beyond research into literacies in digital environmentsto raise questions about how we theorise and research literacies more generally. Inparticular, this leads us to re-examine the use of the literacy event as a unit of analysis.We argue that these issues are particularly important at a time when diverse and multipleliteracies collide with educational policies that reduce literacies to ‘the basics’ and tosimple models that prescribe what is learned.

New literacies and new ways of thinking about literacies

A persistent theme in the study of digital literacies is the identification of new practices ormindsets, which are seen as radical points of departure from old practices and togetherconstitute an epochal shift in the economy of communication (Lankshear & Knobel, 2011).However, this binary division of new and old is hard to maintain in the rapidly changingworld of digital technology – a world in which what is ‘new’ rapidly becomes ‘old’, andeverything from operating systems to applications is continually updating. Just as hard-ware and software repeatedly change, so do the routines and practices associated withthe latest social media trend, or mobile device (Merchant, 2012a). Only at a certain levelof generality does the contrast between new and old hold true: reading and writing on-screen is qualitatively different from reading and writing in print media, and by exten-sion, the on-screen and on-line are associated with certain affordances and with certainways of representing, navigating and constructing social and cultural life. Merchant(2013) identifies six trends in new communicative practices relating to the following:the increased multimodality of texts, the linguistic innovation that results as peoplerespond to the affordances of digital media, the tendency to remix, the associated playful-ness and participation as people interact around shared interests on-line and off-line andthe increased connection with known and unknown others. These trends have been wellcharted, and there is a growing body of research mapping the myriad ways that peopledraw on the possibilities of digital media (Coiro, Knobel, Lankshear & Leu, 2008).

Copyright © 2013 UKLA. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ,UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA

Journal of Research in Reading, ISSN 0141-0423 DOI:10.1111/jrir.12006Volume 37, Issue 1, 2014, pp 36–50

But what can the study of these new forms of mediated communication tell us aboutliteracies in a more general sense?Our previous work on literacy and technology in classroom contexts has explored relation-

ships between the online and the offline, and the porosity of these in the lived experience ofpupils and teachers (Burnett, 2011a, 2011b; Burnett, Merchant, Pahl & Rowsell, forthcoming;Merchant, 2011, 2012a, 2012b). This has led us to question the relevance of the binary dis-tinctions that recur and proliferate in the literature – those that assume boundaries between on-line and offline, digital and print and so on – but it also provokes us to question how we seeliteracies more generally. Do we conceptualise literacies differently as a result of studyinghow they occur in the range of overlapping spaces for meaning-making in ‘digitallyconnected’ contexts? And what do these conceptualisations mean for researching literacies?It is undoubtedly the case that the study of new, digital literacies has contributed to a growth

of interest in fluidity, hybridity and the blurring of boundaries between contexts, and this hasdrawn our attention to different kinds of spatial and temporal orderings. We see this inaccounts of digital practices that theorise relationships between online and offline meaning-making. Leander andMcKim (2003), for example, have drawn on analysis of one youth’s on-line practices to argue that we need to use a ‘connective ethnography’ to investigate onlineand offline as over-layered spaces, whereas Wohlwend (2009) has described how young chil-dren rework classroom activities in the light of their experience of digital media at home.Others have examined relationships between global and local literacies, exploring stabilitiesand instabilities as meanings flow across sites (Barton, 2010; Prinsloo, 2005). As onlineand offline merge and meld, so do experiences and meanings wrought in different sites andinflected by different discourses.Importantly, when these boundaries begin to blur, some of our own certainties around

researching literacy begin to unravel. The influential body of work in New Literacy Studieshas used analyses of situated literacy events to illuminate literacies as social practicescreating a powerful language of description (Barton, 2007; Brice-Heath, 1983; Street,1984). Such work has provided rich insights into relationships between literacies andpower, identities, discourses and, more broadly, context. However, the very process of lo-cating literacy can imply a certain boundedness or fixity, which is at odds with the morefluid, hybrid landscapes and timescapes of the digital age. Grappling with this relationalityhas led us to revisit organising notions such as ‘event’ and ‘context’ and to questionwhether they have sufficient explanatory power to capture the complex flows of meaningthat circulate around digital texts. But is it just these new, digital literacies that are com-plex? Here, we suggest that the investigation of these relatively new phenomena unmaskscomplexities that exist wherever we find literacy practices and argue that it may be timelyand productive to think differently about literacies.In an attempt to do this, the current paper raises theoretical and methodological issues in

literacy studies that emerged from an empirical investigation of how children and adults makemeanings when virtual worlds are embedded in classroom contexts. We argue that theseissues are particularly important at a time when diverse and multiple literacies collide withliteracy policies in education that reduce literacies to ‘the basics’. Given the current educa-tional climate, which is characterised by high levels of accountability, limited and oftenscripted approaches to classroom literacy teaching, we feel that it is important to articulate aposition in which the supposed certainties underpinning these simple models are seen asinadequate descriptions of the everyday literacies of children and young people. Recognisingand articulating complexity, we argue, are central to problematising current policy trends inliteracy education.

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Exploring virtual worlds in classrooms (or classrooms in virtual worlds?)

In order to explore these themes, we focus on a project in which children used virtual worldtechnology in a primary classroom. In order to better understand meaning-making in thehybrid, fluid classroom spaces explored in previous work (Burnett, forthcoming (a),forthcoming (b); Merchant, 2011), we adopted a multi-perspectival approach. This approachwas informed by realist assumptions that we could gain an authentic understanding of theinterweaving of online and offline dimensions of meaning-making through triangulatingmultiple perspectives of literacy events. Our analysis, however, generated a much morecomplex picture, which challenged the assumptions informing the study’s design. Inwhat follows, we provide further details on the project itself before critiquing these initialassumptions and highlighting a series of methodological and theoretical issues associatedwith making sense of meaning-making.The virtual world in this case was ‘Barnsborough’, a secure virtual world built by

virtuallylearning.co.uk in the Active Worlds Educational Universe (www.activeworlds.com).Developed by a group of educators, researchers and consultants, it was designed toprovide opportunities for children to engage in literacy activities within a meaningfuland motivating context (Merchant, 2009, 2010). ‘Barnsborough’ itself is a three-dimensional simulation of a deserted town, which children can explore, visiting inter-connected locations such as sewers, a park, the town hall, an Internet cafe, militaryheadquarters and an old castle. As they move around the world, they encounter clueshinting at why the town is deserted in the form of dropped notes, Internet sites, graffiti,posters and so on. Children are represented as avatars on-screen and have access toan online chat function through which they can communicate with others. Chat itemsappear not only above avatars’ heads but also on an ongoing scrolling chatlog at thebottom of the screen. They can access other functions, such as teleporting or flyingbetween different locations.The project involved 18 children, aged 9–10 years, from two schools in the north of

England – one small rural school and one mid-sized urban primary. Teachers from theseschools were working with us to consider ways of using virtual worlds in classrooms(Bailey et al., 2013). The children from one school visited Barnsborough on a prioroccasion, whereas the children from the other school were new to the world. The projecttook place throughout a single school day. Previous research into the educational use ofvirtual worlds had indicated that such work was better performed intensively, to enablechildren to immerse themselves in emerging narratives, rather than in short bursts oversuccessive weeks (Merchant, 2009). Children accessed the world using laptops (mainlyindividually but some shared) in a single classroom. We invited the children simply toexplore the world and try and solve the mystery. The children had access to iPads andnotepaper to record clues and ideas. A teacher and teaching assistant from each schoolwere also present to support if children needed help in navigating Barnsborough (whichthey rarely did). Towards the end of the day, children were encouraged to publish theirideas on a blog created for the project.Influenced by Hine’s call for ‘connective ethnographies’ (Hine, 2000) and in rec-

ognition of the textured nature of the online/offline spaces we were exploring, ourmethodology was designed to capture what children did on-screen and off-screen.We aimed to coordinate data collection around single events involving specificchildren, using video data and field notes from researchers in-world and in theclassroom. Three researchers were present in the classroom. One researcher videoed

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http://www.activeworlds.com

specific children as they interacted in and out of world to support close multimodalinteraction analysis (Taylor, 2012). A second and third (Cathy) took field notes: onenoted what the specific children did on-screen as they journeyed through the world;the other focused on broader flows of movement in the classroom, as childrenmoved around, sometimes working alone or sometimes congregating in groups. Afourth researcher (Guy) met the children in-world as an avatar. SMS messages weresent from the classroom to tell him where specific children were in Barnsborough sohe could engineer encounters with them.Prior parental permission was gained for children’s involvement in the research. We

also asked children’s permission for us to record them working, and it was clarified that theopportunity to visit Barnsbrough was not dependent on their participation in the research.Children were told that they could ask us to stop filming or making notes at any point, andwe were sensitive to nonverbal signs suggesting they would rather not be observed. One ofthe teachers explained that it was safe to interact with Guy in-world as he was part of theproject, while emphasising that interaction with unknown individuals online was potentiallyunsafe and reminding the children of e-safety guidelines. At the end of the session, thechildren had an opportunity to Skype with Guy, to ask questions about the world and Guy’srole and to reflect on their experience.As stated previously, our intention was to use our analysis to coordinate data from

multiple perspectives around specific children engaged in single events. However, it soonbecame apparent that this was highly problematic. First, there were practical problems.The children raced between locations in-world, only forming temporary groupings. Evenwith SMS text-messaging, it was hard to coordinate the different researchers around asingle child. More importantly, however, as we shared different perspectives afterwards,it was apparent that, rather than converging to provide nuanced insights of meaning-making, perspectives diverged and this challenged the realist assumptions underpinningthe initial study design. Although initially frustrating, this experience led us to confrontsome of our assumptions about how to frame literacies for analysis. It led us to questionthe very idea of ‘event’ as a framing concept, and this in turn prompted a reworking ofsome of our theoretical and methodological assumptions around literacies. In whatfollows, we illustrate our thinking using data from the project, drawing on Law and Mol’swork (Law, 2004; Law & Moll, 2002) to argue for the foregrounding of complexity inaccounts of literacy.

Telling stories

The illustrative samples of data presented in the following paragraphs consist of two storiesabout Barnsborough. We use the metaphor of ‘story’ with some caution. It suits our purposesin the sense that a story, or narrative, may represent one particular telling – a version of theworld as seen from a particular perspective. At the same time though, the story metaphorhas some shortcomings, particularly in the ways in which a story is bounded – with distinctbeginnings and endings, anchored in location and structured around a sequence of events(Clough, 2002). It is only as we see these stories in relation to one another, echoing notionsof ‘assemblage’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) that this boundedness starts to dissolve andthe stories become rhizomatic, with threads of each appearing in the other, sometimessurfacing or sometimes disappearing from view as different characters, settings and actionsare foregrounded and others fade into the background, or are discarded altogether. By

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extension, then, these and other possible stories stack up in different ways, always offering adifferent point of view.The two stories we focus on here are our own on the basis of field notes. We do not

suggest that these stories are more significant than the many other stories that were and couldhave been told about that day – by our colleague researchers, the children and teachers. Weuse our own stories simply because these are most resonant for us and chose these particularstories because they had points of connection. In what follows, we use these stories to beginto revisit the notion of the literacy event. In the first, Cathy narrates her take on one child’sexplorations of the world, whereas in the second, Guy tells a story of being virtually presentalthough physically remote. Pseudonyms are used for all children.

Cathy’s storyThe children have been asked to create blog entries on iPads about what they think hashappened in the world. It is very quiet in the room. Most children are typing on theirblogs . . . but some are still quietly exploring Barnsborough. One boy, John, is sat aloneat back of the class. He’s clearly carrying on with his exploration. He seems to be escaping,away from the class and the classroom and following his own pathway.

He’s got an iPad in his hand . . . but is really looking at the laptop screen and Barnsborough.The screen displays a boulder-strewn mountain top. It’s a peaceful scene. He sits back andopens the cover on his iPad. He writes, ‘Alain escape’. His fingers hover over the on-screenkeyboard as if he’s to write more . . . but then he puts the iPad aside and looks back at thescreen. He picks up the ipad again and writes, ‘I fond a lot of evidens’. The misspelling ofevidence is underlined and an alternative spelling appears next to the misspelling. He knowshow he can correct the spelling to the one suggested but it’s hard to negotiate; he’s holding theiPad in his hand but this makes it hard to move the cursor. His fingers hover over the screen toreplace ‘evidens’with ‘evidence’ but the iPad’s too heavy. The iPad is a new thing to be usingin school and he doesn’t seem to have worked out how to use it whilst sitting at a desk whichhas a laptop on it. He seems to try and solve the problem by putting the iPad down level onthe desk in front of the laptop so it forms a kind of continuous surface with the laptopkeyboard – a level surface on which maybe he can write.

John’s about to continue writing when he hears another boy, Luke, who’s also stillexploring; Luke calls softly to his friend, ‘I’m in the castle. If you wanna see the castleyou have to go right down here’. Luke and John are in different locations inBarnsborough. When Luke gives instructions to his friend, John ‘follows’ even thoughthey’re not meant for him. Because he’s somewhere different in world to begin with,the instructions lead him somewhere different. ‘Following’ the instructions, he goesdown the path, along the wall to the flower garden. He picks up the iPad again. But theflow he has in the world is missing. He’s stuck on a spelling. He puts his hand up and turnsround to look at the teacher. She doesn’t come and he puts the iPad down on the table thenstands it up using the cover. With iPad safely stowed, he looks at the screen and navigateshis way through the garden. He looks over his shoulder, then keeps going to the castlewall. He keeps exploring round the walls, occasionally loitering, going forward. He looksround (not sure if this is on-screen or in class) and opens the gate to go into the militaryHQ. Now he’s whizzing over the compound, the runway, the power station. He stopswhen he sees some text in a speech balloon. It’s Guy who seems to be hovering.

Guy arrives on the chatscreen. John types: ‘where’s the castle’ and Guy replies, ‘Try40S17W’. John carefully types ‘40S 17W’ – accuracy matters if you’re going to get to whereyou want to go in world. He turns round and calls to Luke behind him, ‘I know what the codeis for the castle. I know the post code for the castle. Guy told me’. He presses ‘enter’ and is inthe castle dungeons. The walls are of grey stone blocks. There are dark bars enclosing cells, acobbled floor. Meanwhile Luke and his friend are in the dungeon already but a glitch in theprogramme means they’re stuck in the floor and can’t get out. They look across to John’s



screen and see that John is in the dungeon too but is moving freely around: ‘He’s managed tomove’. Luke calls across to John: ‘I don’t think you’re meant to be there. I don’t think theyhave planned for anyone to be there’. John teleports out again, outside the castle wall. Heteleports ‘home’ and is back in the sewers where he started.

Cathy’s account is produced from the classroom perspective – a perspective that is realisedin her description of children’s activities and their interactions with technological objects andenvironments. In some ways, the idea of physical bodies organised in what is commonlyreferred to as a class, located in the space of the school and constituted as a classroom is takenfor granted as we are introduced to ‘blog entries on iPads’, attempts to spell and the raising ofhands to attract the teacher’s attention. The quiet classroom recedes into the background as thefocus narrows down on a particular child, John, whose attempts to organise the physical spaceof his desk by positioning the iPad and laptop are subjected to a fine-grain description. We areinvited to see the stubbornmateriality of the hardware, the challenges of interacting with it, theneed to open it, to pick it up and its heft in his small hands. This conjures up a rather awkwardchoreography of physical movement andmaterial objects. As if continuous with this, even theact of writing seems awkward and complex, as fingers hover over actual and virtual keyboardswhile feedback on spelling is automatically generated by the machines at John’s fingertips.There is the feeling of an emerging network of human and nonhuman agents (Latour, 2005),but in some ways, their connection is never smooth or unproblematic.

Guy’s storyIt seems like there’s a bit of a lull in Barnsborough. I haven’t had a text message from theclassroom in a while, and there don’t seem to be any avatars around. I’m on the hillsidejust below the manor house and turn round to see if anyone’s about. And that’s when Isee the castle. I haven’t seen it for a while, and have lost a sense of where it is. It’s a prettygood simulation of a medieval castle – I like it – and it’s built on a flat-topped hill just theother side of the wall that surrounds the park. I fly over the wall so I can get a teleport forthe location. Then I make my way back to the manor house.

I have that strange feeling I’ve sometimes experienced in teaching situations – I’msupposed to be doing something, but everyone seems busy – I’m redundant! I wonderwhether the magic of Barnsborough has started to fade for the children. It’s at about thatpoint that I decide that sharing the castle teleport might be a productive intervention.Wandering into the manor house I see some avatars and as I approach them I start chattingto them about the castle. They seem to want to go to the Town Hall to look for clues and wego in that direction together. At one point I send them the teleport for the castle.

Guy Merchant: OK that’s it!charlie: MEET YOU THEREGuy Merchant: what at the town hall?Guy Merchant: maybe the answer is in there?charlie: IS IT WERE YOU MEENGuy Merchant: could beGuy Merchant: I’m not sureWilliam: SSSHHHHHGuy Merchant: I didn’t say a thing, but if you wanna see the castle, you have to comeright down hereGuy Merchant: castle is here 40S 16Wjames: take me to a safe place#Guy Merchant: 40S 16WGuy Merchant: no poison there

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james: HelpGuy Merchant: what happened?Guy Merchant: OK try 40S 17WGuy Merchant: HiGuy Merchant: emily?Guy Merchant: what@s here?Guy Merchant: army campjohn: were’s the castleGuy Merchant: try 40S 17Wnatalie: HI KATIEnatalie: hi charliejames: 4040s43S 18W

Then it seems to catch on. Five or six avatars are clammering for the teleport, and then when we allget there, it seems we’ve hit a glitch. The castle won’t completely rez and we’re all stuck some-where between the floors. The children’s avatars are suspended there, frozen. It’s getting towardsthe end of the afternoon and it feels like the wrong note to end on. The avatars are stranded inspace. I imagine pandemonium in the classroom.

In hindsight it was all a bit frustrating – perhaps I made the mistake of getting too excited about thecastle – sending the kids a teleport only for them to get stuck in between the layers, so although Iwas extremely busy rushing around, giving teleports to rescue people, the whole thing was a bitchaotic. It really felt as though things needed moving on a bit (that’s all about me, of course, asa quasi-teacher) and I thought the castle experience might contribute. I was probably wrong!

Whilst Cathy’s third person account of John’s actions foregrounds the physical and material,Guy’s first person account foregrounds affect. In his story, there is a sense of isolation ordislocation from the group. His reference to ‘the classroom’ seems to position him somewhereelse, somewhere separate. When he refers to receiving SMS text messages, he does not referto the researcher who sent them (using her mobile phone) but ‘the classroom’, and this seemsto place him in opposition to that. This is not a joint endeavour with other teachers andresearchers, but one where he feels responsible for what happens: a function perhaps of beingthe only adult in-world and of his investment in and prior experience of Barnsborough. Thesefeelings of responsibility seem linked to his sense that there must have been chaos when theteleport had an undesired outcome.We have a sense of some of the texts that worked to ‘fix’ this as an ‘event’ for Guy – the

text messages, the chatlog – texts here seemed to generate locations and comings together incontrast to the very fluid ‘running around’ that typified children’s interactions with the worldwhen viewed from the classroom. Guy focuses on these comings together; when he describeshis movement round the world, he frames this movement in terms of generating encounterswith children. In doing so, he seems to be simultaneously in the virtual and the material world.His reference to texts from the classroom places him at his desk in his room, but in the rest ofthe story, he locates himself in Barnsborough.

Other ways of looking

What becomes immediately apparent from these two accounts is the multivalent natureof the situation. In Cathy’s story, John seems driven by his determination to explore thevirtual world, but this is over-layered by an awareness of classroom conventions and a



need to adhere to these – at least in his overt behaviour. At the same time, in a differentlocation, Guy is preoccupied with the presence and absence of virtual objects and theresponsibilities of his own role as an actor in a classroom that is largely imagined and at leastin that sense, virtual.On the other hand, we see various points at which the two accounts intersect. For

example, Guy types ‘I didn’t say a thing, but if you wanna see the castle, you have tocome right down here’ in the chatlog, and in Cathy’s story, Luke calls softly, ‘I’m inthe castle’ and then adds (presumably reading from his screen) ‘If you wanna see thecastle you have to go right down here’. Later on in Cathy’s account, John carefully types‘40S 17W’ shortly after Guy has sent this as grid-reference for a teleport in the in-worldchat. Such connections erode the sense of boundedness generated through the stories.Location seems to span both material and virtual worlds, and our sense of what we mightotherwise see as ‘context’ erodes with the over-layering and interweaving of incidentsacross these spaces and in relation to different layers of interest. Both stories are far richerthan their points of contact. We see this in the different takes on adult–child relationships.In Cathy’s account, John’s work is conducted under the radar of teacher surveillance,whereas Guy’s account is full of the uncertainties of adult guidance and intervention inthe lives of children. Incidents, individuals, objects and places are neither situated insingle or plural worlds, but tangled up in both. And although the stories ‘stack up’ bylinking together, they have very different trajectories. Any easy assumptions about whatis going on here – for example about the power relationships between adults and childrenor the ways that texts are significant – are problematised as the stories articulate with eachother to juxtapose different perspectives.We can begin to articulate this by drawing on the work of Law and Mol (Law, 2004;

Law & Moll, 2002). Law (2004) refers to ‘fractional objects’ and ‘fractal lines’ in describ-ing phenomena that occupy more than one dimension but less than two. Incidents, individ-uals, objects or places are not completely in either the material or virtual world, and nor dothey jump between. Instead, the virtual seems to inflect the material and vice versa. Johncould be seen as in a ‘world of his own’ but not in the sense that his exploration of thevirtual world sets him apart from the rest. He moves both in the classroom and inBarnsborough; his laptop is both a physical object in the classroom and the portal to thevirtual world; he interacts with others both in and out of world. At the same time, the class-room frames not only what he does in physical space but also what he does online The‘world of his own’ is perhaps the one he helps construct as he operates across bothenvironments and helps sustain a space that allows both movement and stillness, bothautonomy and compliance, both material and virtual actions. Importantly then, theseare not parallel plural places inhabited by parallel plural identities. Instead, as Lawwrites, we can understand this in terms of a multiplicity that ‘implies that differentrealities overlap and interface with one another. Their relations, partially co-ordinated, arecomplex and messy’ (Law, 2004, p. 61).Law and Moll (2002) suggest that, in thinking about this multiplicity of experience, we

should avoid the temptation to have a sense of some kind of whole but instead acknowledgethat we can only ever gain partial perspectives. They suggest we do this by thinking in termsof ‘lists’ (which do not classify but signal different ways of classifying things), ‘cases’(that disrupt by drawing attention to other ways of seeing things – not as part of a largerwhole) or ‘walks’ (where you can never see the whole picture but are always vividly in oneplace at a time). We add to this by suggesting that producing and ‘stacking up’ stories, ormultiple accounts, is an alternative way of approaching or exposing these complexities.

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For instance, we show how John, as represented by Cathy in her story, and Guy, in his,makes sense of locations in very different ways in terms of what he has encountered before.So, we could see John constructing one kind of space and Guy constructing another, eventhough these may intersect in the same location – the castle at 40S 17W. These locationsare not just backdrops but infused with meanings as individuals make sense of them.The castle for Guy, which he describes as ‘a pretty good simulation’, may be quite differentto the castle imagined by individual children, each of them holding their own aggregationof personal experiences and meanings. All see the place in light of what has gone before,and that place is constructed through what they do in it and in the light of the experiencesthey have had within it (Pink, 2012).Of course, this complexity does not simply arise because individuals experience phenom-

ena differently. We could conceive individuals’ experiences as a series of pathways, whichoccasionally weave or knot together as ‘events’. However, for us, this cannot quite capturethe different ways these often divergent experiences occasionally intersect or meld; wecould not represent what was happening here by telling a linear story of the journey ofGuy or John (or of Cathy) through Barnsborough. We need to recognise that each alsointersects with what others do – as, for example, when John reads and responds to thechatlog in the light of his particular journey through Barnsborough or talks to his friends,he fuses together action and interaction both in-world and in the classroom. We see thisas he switches between ‘doing as he is told’ in class and continuing, surreptitiously, withhis investigation of Barnsborough. An analysis of his online/offline activity as binary orseparate events is insufficient. Instead, we suggest it is helpful to see him as enacting a kindof ‘layered presence’ (Martin et al., 2012), in space that is both online and offline, bothschooled and not-schooled.In unpacking this, we can begin to identify some of the things that are latent within the

experience of John, which we could see as ‘folded’ (Deleuze, 2001) into what he does ashe interacts with the text. For example, folded into his interactions in and aroundBarnsborough is his prior experience of different kinds of texts, his experience of usingvirtual worlds or online texts, the way he has positioned himself, or has been positioned,in relation to literacy in the classroom and also of course, his understandings of classrooms,military headquarters, castles and so on, as well as his relationships with other children andadults. If we accept this, then our urge to simplify – and delineate an ‘event’ as a unit ofanalysis – becomes problematic.

And then what of events?

The persuasiveness of the idea of a literacy event seems to us to rest on the idea of co-presence (Urry, 2004) – by the texts, things, bodies and locations that are seen to berelevant at any one moment in time and place; an event provides us with a snapshotthrough which we can look across social, material, cultural and embodied dimensions ofmeaning-making. This has been and continues to be powerful in providing criticalstandpoints for looking at literacy in institutional settings as well as understanding literacypractices as nuanced and situated (Barton & Hamilton, 1998). It bounds practices in timeand place, holding them still so we examine them in terms of situatedness. This bounded-ness, however, brings with it certain epistemological challenges, which have beenhighlighted by developments in two sometimes interconnected subfields of New LiteracyStudies: first those concerned with relationships between literacy practices and broader



social movements, and second those theorising meaning-making across online/offlinecontexts. Each of these problematises the process of identifying ‘events’ and ‘eventness’(Baynham & Prinsloo, 2009).In exploring relationships between literacy practices and broader social contexts, Brandt

and Clinton (2002) argue that focusing on literacy as local can lead us to overplaysituatedness and agency in local contexts and to underplay the significance of the‘transcontextual’ (p. 343), and as a consequence, the power relations that inflect practices.Drawing on Latour, Brandt and Clinton suggest that we need to be alert to connectionsbeyond the local and the way literacies – and the things, people, routines and sites associatedwith them – operate as technologies to do work, which has its origins and effects in othersites. Although people may act to sustain the significance of literacies at local level, wecannot ignore how literacy ‘events’ are connected in multiple ways to other times andplaces. From this perspective, the neatly bounded literacy event starts to become porousand permeable. Brandt and Clinton argue that rather than focusing on events, it is usefulto look at ‘literacy-in-action’. This focuses on how people leverage what is available tothem –what they use and how, and what they ignore or sideline. This allows us to acknowl-edge both ‘transcontextualising’ dimensions of literacy as well as how people recruit anduse literacy resources within local actions. It helps us see how meanings cross settingsand what happens to them as they do so; it recognises both ‘localising moves’ and‘globalising connects’ (p. 351).Kell (2011) argues that we need to see events as part of chains of incidents that work to

produce the ‘infrastructure of our lives’ (p. 612). She highlights how drawing boundariesaround events can ignore the important work that happens as literacies cross space and time.She argues that our focus should shift to the ‘traffic of texts’ (p. 613), to how texts and theirmovements are intimately connected with how we relate to one another and organise ourlives and the ways in which local and global power relations inflect each other. Rather thanlooking at what happens in a single location, we might focus on flows across locations andfor Kell, this flow between contexts is more important than the apparently bounded contextsin which a text is used. Indeed, as Baynham and Prinsloo (2009) point out, it becomes in-creasingly difficult to identify events occurring around single texts in our ‘text-saturatedworld’ in which we encounter multiple texts. Such work highlights the need to explore con-nections between activity in different sites, on different occasions and between different‘levels’ of activity.Research exploring on-screen/off-screen activity has added other perspectives to inform

our understandings of events and context. Leander (2003), for example, highlighted howdigital practices cross different space-times and argued that we need to consider howinterrelationships between experience in different locations play out as we engage withonline texts. This means that we need to look simultaneously at what happens in multipleover-layered sites, examining ‘siting’ (Leander & McKim, 2003) on-screen and off-screen.The move here is to see how activities in different spaces inflect each other. Of course,this is methodologically challenging. As Jacobs (2004) explores in her analysis of oneadolescent’s use of instant messaging, capturing what happens in different sites is problematic.Moreover, the very act of recognising the need to capture both online and offline maylead us to see these as different sites and lead us to new binaries. We need to find waysof conceptualising multiple perspectives on what happens across online/offline sites. Asexplored previously, the idea of the fractal, in which phenomena occupy more than onedimension but less than two, opens up new points of view for describing the complexityof literacies in everyday life.

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Baroque conceptualisations of literacy: destabilising the ‘smooth scheme’ of theliteracy event

These considerations lead us to invest in other ways of knowing, on the basis of storiesthat might otherwise remain untold. Building on ideas we have begun to develop elsewhere(Burnett, 2011b; Burnett et al., forthcoming; Merchant, 2012b), we suggest that Kwa’s notionof baroque complexity offers much that can be brought to bear on our understanding andanalysis of literacies. This perspective builds on Deleuze’s (2001) reading of the baroque,leading Kwa to identify three themes:

First the historic baroque insists on a strong phenomenological realness, a ‘sensuousmateriality’. Second, this materiality is not confined to, or locked within a simple individualbut flows out in many directions, blurring the distinction between individual and envi-ronment. And third, there is also the baroque inventiveness, the ability to produce lots ofnovel combinations out of a rather limited set of elements, for instance as in baroque music(Kwa, 2002, p. 26).

In the first of these, we are encouraged to ‘look down’ into the detail of experience and toacknowledge its heterogeneity. The emphasis is placed on what we can know rather thanon a more general or abstract sense of understanding – indeed, Kwa argues that abstractionitself is alien to the baroque (Kwa, 2002, p. 27). This kind of knowing emphasises embodi-ment and materiality, suggesting that we are not simply rational subjects and that in fact,our activities are in some ways unruly – as witnessed by John’s clandestine operations inBarnsborough; that they are threaded through with emotion – as in the uncertainties of Guyabout the teleporting incident; and that they are interconnected with the materiality of bodies,machines and other stuff – as in John’s working space in the classroom.In the second, we are invited to look at the complex bundling together of individuals,

objects and the environment. Here, our understanding of John, his literacy practices, iPad,laptop, material and virtual worlds are folded together and are in some ways inseparable.What John does intersects with what others do – as he reads and responds to the chatlogin the light of his own experience, or talks to others in the classroom. Sometimes, texts suchas ‘40S 17W’ work as articulating objects around which other actions and interactionscoalesce. The text acts as a node around which different sites, different activities and differ-ent meanings are momentarily articulated. The focus of analysis then is not the singularevent that occurs around the text but the ways that this interconnecting mesh of emotions,materialities, activities and intentionalities inflect and interfere with one another. This canbe seen from the perspective of baroque complexity in which all boundaries are hard tosustain.In the third, we focus on ‘novel combinations’ – and to us, this suggests how movement

in the traffic of texts can develop in different directions – in our two stacking stories and inall other possible tellings and retellings. Sometimes, actions and objects appear in differentstories, and different stories seem to articulate with each other through these actions andobjects. So, in Cathy’s story, John sets off to see the castle having read messages on thechatlog. He does not meet others as such – their stories do not converge – and his experienceof the castle does not seem as emotionally charged as Guy’s – he appears to simply move onwhen he cannot move through the castle as he wants – but yet, others’ comments andexchanges are significant to what he does and how he navigates the world.Kwa’s notion of baroque complexity does not provide us with a neat substitute for the literacy

event as unit of analysis. However, we suggest that the very act of problematising the ‘smooth



scheme’ (Law &Moll, 2002) is important and that baroque complexity provides an alternativeaccount that helps us to see what is not normally seen and to expose the fiction of singularity.It opens up new ways of looking at what happens with, through and around texts.

Conclusions

Researching literacy practices in an era of intense digital mediation has prompted us toquestion some assumptions about researching and conceptualising literacies. Throughlooking at a ‘telling case’ from a study of virtual world gameplay in a classroom setting,the distinctiveness of subjects, objects and locations repeatedly escapes our grasp. Identifyingan event as a unit of analysis depends on establishing fixities – on who is present and wherethey are, and this contributes to a sense of context as something in which literacies occur.However, seeing context as a ‘static container’ (Burgess, 2010) is problematic. It may bemoreappropriate to see it ‘as a dynamic process of contextualisation in which language and contextcontinuously co-construct each other’ (Burgess, 2010, p. 19). If this is worthwhile in the studyof literacies associated with digital technologies, we suggest that it is equally applicable toother literacy practices. In the light of this, we argue that a baroque sensibility may providean important counterpoint to the abstractions generated in other accounts of literacy. In partic-ular, a focus on multiplicities may assist in avoiding the temptation to reify the event as a unitof analysis. It may also help us to see things differently, to reveal what otherwise might behidden and to show how our positionality can constrain our analyses and interpretations.It is important to emphasise that we are not arguing for the kind of relativism that dissi-

pates any discussion of the ethics of practice. We would agree with Haraway (1988, p. 584)that, ‘Relativism is a way of being nowhere while claiming to be everywhere equally. The“equality” of positioning is a denial of responsibility and critical inquiry’. Although the ar-gument for seeing context as fluid and hybrid is compelling to us, we have to recognise thatpeople do group their experience as they refer to it, and so understanding how things areseen to be bounded as events, places or social groupings is important because it helps usto understand the processes by which we arrive at singularity (Law, 2011).In educational contexts, this multiplicities perspective is important because it reminds us

of the complexities that are already there, but may be hidden by reductive curricular, andby pedagogies that are sometimes scripted and often tightly controlled. Literacy is repeat-edly conceived as singular and linear, a product of development and causality, alwayssusceptible to categorisation and in terms of fixed units (such as schools, pupils, standardisedtest results and teaching strategies [Street, 2012]). These fixed units work as technologies(Law & Moll, 2002) to hold together certain sets of connections that lead us to understandliteracy education in certain ways and inform how we conceive good/bad schools andteachers, and high/low achievers. They contribute to the shared language through whichpoliticians, inspectors, teachers, parents and researchers may talk about literacies in school.However, we would argue that this habit of ‘deferring multiplicity’ (Law, 2004) is problem-atic in many ways. It leads us to oversimplify how we understand what matters to children asthey make meanings from texts in classrooms and the processes involved in doing so. Itdeflects attention away from relationships that may be significant – with people, with priorand anticipated experiences, and with material and embodied dimensions of literacies. It leadsus to define trajectories in terms of the categories that we impose, rather than the orderings intime and space that may be significant to children and adults in classrooms. In foregroundingeasily identifiable actions that map onto predetermined measures of children’s ‘success’ in

POINTS OF VIEW 47


literacy, it backgrounds felt experience and detracts from the multiple trajectories that may runthrough any engagement with text. In contrast, a focus on baroque complexity helps us to askthe important question: what else is going on here? Rather than seeking to categorise and or-der, it helps us recognise and interrogate multiplicity and consider how different interests in-tersect during meaning-making through and around texts.In arguing for multiple perspectives, we do not attempt to ‘triangulate’ or create a truth out

of different perspectives and certainly do not present another grand theory of literacy in socialand cultural life. Instead, we emphasise the indeterminacy, the messiness of literacies andproblematise unitary analyses of literacy practices. This approach prompts us to constantly re-visit our notions of what is going on; to examine points of connection and disconnectionbetween the experiences, interpretations and improvisations of individuals and groups; andthe way texts are implicated in these relationships – central or peripheral, mediating or not– and by implication, how these points of connection and disconnection may be significantto literacy learning. We argue that we need this more than ever because of oversimplifiedconceptualisations of literacy and the kinds of school literacies that are created in the enact-ment of policy.

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the contribution of our collaborators in this project:Chris Bailey, Karen Daniels, Emma Gill, Jemma Monkhouse, Julie Rayner and RobertaTaylor. We would also like to thank the United Kingdom Literacy Association for aresearch grant.

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http://140.114.40.238/files/Knowledge%20Places%204.pdf

http://140.114.40.238/files/Knowledge%20Places%204.pdf

Cathy Burnett is Reader in the Department of Teacher Education at Sheffield Hallam Universitywhere she leads the Language and Literacy Research and Scholarship Group. She has publishedwidely in the field of literacy with a particular focus on new technologies and relationships betweenliteracies within and beyond formal educational settings. She is currently co-editor of Literacy.

Guy Merchant is Professor of Literacy in Education in the Faculty of Development and Society,Sheffield Hallam University. His research focuses on the relationship between children, youngpeople, new technology and literacy, and he has published widely in this area. Web 2.0 for schools:Learning and social participation (2009), co-written with Julia Davies, has been influential incharting the way forward for new literacies. He is co-editor of Virtual literacies: Interactive spacesfor children and young people (2012) and one of the founding editors of the Journal of Early Child-hood Literacy.

Received 22 December 2012; revised version received 25 March 2013.

Address for correspondence: Cathy Burnett, Department of Teacher Education, SheffieldHallam University, Sheffield, South Yorkshire S1 2NE, UK. E-mail: [email protected]



Documents

Points of view: reconceptualising literacies through an exploration of adult and child interactions in a virtual world